Yes, I think you're correct. Today's kids grow up knowing people from around the world, and often know them well before they ever see the colour of the skin.
The Baby Boom generation was the last to be raised in apartheid. Younger people seldom actually fathom how different their society is from the one that we were born into during the 40s, 50s, and early 60s.
I, for instance, had never even known a white person by name until I was in the 7th grade. I was in my teens before I had in my teens before I had ever been in a classroom with a white person, in my teens before I had ever sat in a restaurant or in a movie theater with a white person. Boomers older than I may have not have actually known a person of the other race until adulthood. Of course, there were times we had to go to the white part of town...but white kids never had to go to the black part of town.
When I was a kid, there were almost no blacks appearing on television, particularly programming for kids, until the mid 60s. Check out YouTube--there are no blacks on The Flintstones or the Jetsons. No blacks on Leave it to Beaver. No blacks on I Dream of Jeannie or Bewitched. No blacks in any of the dozens and dozens of westerns (despite the fact that 25% of cowboys were actually black). No blacks on any commercials. (A rather stand-out exception was Twilight Zone. That program actually had a couple of nearly all-black episodes, and in one case even a black computer scientist. But that, of course, was science fiction.)
Segregation was taught to the Boomer generation as
normalcy. Having a black person appear in normal life doing anything other than servile labor or entertainment was presented as an abnormal situation. It didn't matter whether your parents actually voiced that to you--it was clearly presented in all cultural aspects. It permeated our psyches.
What has surprised me in the last eight years is that I had thought the Boomer generation was the "transition generation." But I see now that we had merely surpressed that early training and have reverted to what was impressed upon us as children: "
Bring up a child in the way he is to go, and he will not depart from it."
That was a dramatically, incredibly different racial culture from that of Millennials.
Even when you look at race-baiting today...
who is doing it? Make up a list of the people you think most responsible for stirring up race problems. Your list will probably be different from mine, but I'll bet money at least three of the top five people in both our lists will be Boomers.
Right now, though, Boomers are in control of America. Boomers control the policies of industry, politics, government, and mass media. Boomers see race first--as we were carefully taught as children--and may see through race later.
But what I see is that Millennials look at other factors first. The problem Millennials have right now, though, is that they have to operate in the framework operated by Boomers.